That's sounds familiar. I went to a university where the one professor that was using Linux (and his knowledge was very little) was constantly tying up the Linu

That's sounds familiar. I went to a university where the one professor that was using Linux (and his knowledge was very little) was constantly tying up the Linux machines in our labs to run his prime number generation tool. His research was into finding a faster/easier way to do prime number factorization in an attempt to speed up cryptography of any kind that uses it. Part of that was finding an easier/faster way to compute prime numbers in the first place. It was fascinating stuff ... but those machines were useless for anything but doing those calculations since it was using up all cores/HT's.